John Keats: When I have Fears that I may cease to be
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high pil`d books, in charact'ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
5
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And feel that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
10
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love;—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think,
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.
Background:
Keats had good reason to fear that he might not live a
long life: both his parents had died relatively young and
his beloved younger brother Tom contracted
tuberculosis, dying when he was only nineteen.
Keats’ great success did not come until after his death
and this poem – written in 1818 - was published
posthumously in 1848.
Aoife O’Driscoll
w ww.ao if esn ot es.com
Poetry
Summary and analysis:
Lines 1-4
The poem opens with Keats’ fear that he will ‘cease to be’ before he has managed to harvest
all of the ideas in his mind. The word ‘When’ at the start of the poem highlights the
inevitability of the passing of time and the poet’s awareness of this.
The imagery in the first four lines of the poem is connected with autumn and harvest, even
though Keats wrote this poem in January. (Think of the importance of the time of year in ‘La
Belle Dame Sans Merci’.) The metaphor of the harvest is used to describe Keats’ writing: he
wants to use his pen to glean, or harvest, his ideas and store them in books just as one might
store grain in granaries or ‘garners’.
Lines 5-8
Having told us that he wishes to preserve his thoughts and writings for posterity, Keats now
presents us with an example of the world he wishes to capture in his poetry. He describes
the beauty and mystery of ‘the night’s starr’d face’ and the ‘high romance’ they symbolise.
He wishes to ‘trace / Their shadows’ – in other words to write about them – but fears that he
will not live long enough to do so.
Keats’ view of romance here is of something elevated: ‘high romance’.
Interestingly, Keats refers to the act of writing a poem as being to do with ‘the magic hand of
chance’. This shows us that he regards the act of writing poetry as something natural yet
mysterious. It cannot be forced.
Lines 9-12
Now Keats moves on to the idea of love. He fears that he may never have the chance to fully
experience love and he mourns the fact that he will ‘never look on thee more’.
The ‘fair creature of an hour’ Keats mentions here is thought to be a young woman he saw
briefly when in Vauxhall Gardens some years before. She features in a number of his other
poems. Another way of looking at the phrase ‘fair creature of an hour’ is to see it as a
comment on the transicence of beauty: it will quickly fade with the passing of time.
Keats’ view of love here is of something that is akin to a ‘faery power’ and an emotion that is
best not analysed or even reflected upon too deeply.
Aoife O’Driscoll
w ww.ao if esn ot es.com
Poetry
Lines 13-14
Keats ends the poem on a bleak note. If he cannot have ‘high romance’ and ‘unreflecting
love’; if he is destined not to achieve lasting fame through his writing, then he feels despair
and isolation. He sees his position in the universe and realises how small and insignificant
our lives are compared to the vastness of the world and the inexorable passing of time. We
cannot help but think, and when we do so we must come to the conclusion that love and
fame ‘to nothingness do sink’.
The inevitability of this conclusion is emphasised by the repetition of ‘when’ throughout the
poem, followed by ‘then’ in the final lines.
Themes:
Fame: Keats was determined to make his mark in the world of poetry and rejected a career as
a doctor in favour of writing, telling his guardian that he meant to rely on his abilities as a
poet.
Love: Keats fears he will never fully experience love in his life.
Death: Whatever else we may or may not experience in our lives, there is only one certainty
and that is death. Our lives, hopes, dreams, loves and so on will all come to noghting in the
greater scheme of things.
Form:
This is a Shakespearean sonnet.
It is written in iambic pentameter.
The ‘turn’ is towards the very end of the poem, when Keats says ‘then on the shore…’
The rhyming couplet at the end of the poem ties up Keats’ ideas neatly and provides a
memorable conclusion to the sonnet.
Aoife O’Driscoll
w ww.ao if esn ot es.com
Poetry